1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method for reducing input pin count of a low pin count (LPC) host, and more particularly to an apparatus for reducing LDRQ input count of the LPC host.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Presently, with the development trend of the stop less integrated and compact size of the main board, Intel Corp. has disclosed a low pin count (LPC) interface. The standard LPC interface having less ten pins will replace the industry standard architecture (ISA) interface, which still requires sixty pins. After disclosing the new LPC standard interface, the LPC bus is commonly used and the following development is the LPC peripheral device are increasingly appeared in the market. If the LPC peripheral device has the require of performing the direct memory access (DMA) or the bus master request, the LPC peripheral device will send a request signal of LDRQ signal to the LPC host. Referring to the FIG. 1, it is a functional block diagram of the connection of the low pin count (LPC) host and the peripheral devices, in accordance with the prior art. Such as shown in the FIG. 1, the first peripheral device 1, the second peripheral device 2, and the third peripheral device 3 is respectively connecting to the LPC host 7 through the LDRQ signal line 4, 5, and 6 for probably having a direct memory access (DMA) request or a bus master request. Specifically, each of the three peripheral devices must individually connects with one LDRQ signal line. In another word, if there were N peripheral devices on the LPC bus, then the LPC host would include N LDRQ input pins. So, with the increasingly amount of the peripheral device on the LPC bus, the LDRQ input pin count of the LPC host will be getting more and more, and further following the increase of the manufacturing cost.
Obviously, the main spirit of the present invention is to provide an apparatus and method for reducing an LDRQ input pin count of a low pin count (LPC) host and lower the manufacturing cost of the LPC host, and then some disadvantages of well-known technology are overcome.